Environment, chronology and resource exploitation of the Pastoral Neolithic in Tsavo, Kenya

Archaeologically detectable human occupations along the Galana River inside Tsavo National Park, Kenya begin around 6,000 years B.P. and continue until 1,300 years B.P. This time period in East Africa is widely known to predate and include the Pastoral Neolithic---geographically and temporally linked early cattle-herding cultures comprised of autonomous communities with loose cultural connections to one another. Data from some contemporaneous sites located in the Great Rift Valley, Lake Victoria Basin and Central Kenyan Highlands indicate that after 3,000 years B.P., residential mobility patterns increased and pastoralists adopted a strong dependence on maintaining and culling herds of domesticated animals. There was also a general regional shift from stone tool production to iron working technologies beginning after 2,000 years B.P. This pattern is not borne out in Tsavo, where artifact analyses indicate that the sites' inhabitants had restricted mobility, relied primarily on exploitation of an endoaquatic resource base and continued to produce stone tools throughout the 4,700-year period when the sites were occupied. Stone Age patterns of technology and resource exploitation persist through the Late Holocene despite evidence that the inhabitants of Tsavo were in contact with iron-using communities on the coast of the Indian Ocean and west of the coastal plains.; Regional and global proxy data indicate subdecadal periodicity in El Nino/La Nina pressure oscillations and more-acid-than-present conditions in East Africa during the late Holocene. This environment is interpreted to have favored intensively occupied settlements along the banks of the Galana River, where a predictable resource base was located. This thesis finds that exploitation and "domestication" of a wide array of available resources is a means of buffering against environmental uncertainty.